Why doesn't Brazil have any "indignados" (outraged people)?

Dear Juan Arias,

I recently reread your article “Why Doesn’t Brazil Have Indignados?”, published on July 7th in the newspaper El País. It had to be you, with your Spanish wit and sharp tongue that make you one of the best foreign correspondents in these Brazilian lands, to poke at our most incurable wound – moral/political apathy – and rub in our faces questions that we Brazilians have long asked ourselves without finding (or without wanting to find) answers. As a reminder, I repeat some of the questions you pose: Do Brazilians not know how to react to the hypocrisy and lack of ethics of politicians? Do they not care about the thieves and saboteurs in the three branches of government? Are these people naturally peaceful, content with the little they have? Why don't students and workers take to the streets against corruption? Shouldn't young people demand a less corrupt country? What kind of country is this that brings together millions for a gay pride parade, millions more for an evangelical march, hundreds for a march in favor of marijuana, but doesn't mobilize against corruption?

To begin, a brief aside: I know perfectly well that you did not write this article, nor ask these questions, with the intention of insulting us and hurting our pride, as some commentators have suggested. Certainly, it wouldn't be you, a well-versed person in our histories and character, both Brazilian and Spanish, originating from a continent that, in the last century—and to cite only this century—was capable of producing a Franco, a Salazar, a Mussolini, and a Hitler, not to mention the Ceaușescus, Stalins, Milosevics, and other madmen who emerged from Eastern European countries, who would cast the first stone at us. No, your questions were certainly formulated with another purpose, much more worthy of your character and intelligence: provocation.

My dear Juan Arias, how can I answer your questions? How can I give vent to the flood of existential memories they bring forth in Brazilian minds like mine, not yet completely narcotized by the Mephistophelean seductions of Gérson's Law – the one that advises us to take advantage of everything and which has become the main hallmark of modern Brazilian culture? Mário de Andrade, in the first half of the 20th century, even tried to invent a character that could function as a metaphor for this corrupt morality: Macunaíma, the hero without character. It only worked for the smartest and most intellectual elite. For the common people, it went unnoticed. Macunaíma is too close to all of us for us to perceive him clearly.

To try and answer you, I could follow the line of thought already explored by several sociologists, historians, and anthropologists, and develop the thesis that corruption here is endemic because it is rooted in our historical amorality. I could say that it comes from the cradle, from the mass of convicts that Portugal sent here when it wanted to empty the prisons of Lisbon in the early days of the colony, and who constituted a good part of the base of our society. I could go on to say that this mania for corruption was nurtured and well-nourished throughout the centuries of slavery, when even the Catholic Church debated whether blacks and indigenous people, who constituted a substantial portion of the population, were beings endowed with souls or simply semi-rational animals destined for the service and pleasure of whites.

Going further along the same path, I could also comment that this mania was enshrined during the years of the Empire and the Republic, under the influence of morally backward national elites and the strong hand of foreign powers, European and American, which never stopped acting behind the scenes, influencing (and filling the pockets of) our rulers.

I could, in short, theorize ad infinitum in an attempt to find philosophical and psychological explanations for our moral fragility. However, to these intellectual exercises, which are better suited to specialists, I prefer simply to give you one or two examples of how all this is ingrained to the core in our people. More than cold theories, I believe they will help you draw your own conclusions.

In the 1970s, in the Porto Seguro region of southern Bahia, I worked as an assistant director on the Danish film Erasmus Montanus, directed by filmmaker and writer Henrik Stangerup. Among my responsibilities was hiring extras for street and crowd scenes. The film was set in Brazil during the early days of Portuguese colonization. There was a scene in which indigenous girls and teenagers bathed naked in a lagoon. An innocent scene, depicting the frolics of young indigenous women. But where to find, in Porto Seguro, families willing to allow their daughters, with their indigenous features, to be filmed naked? "There's no way," someone told me, "you'll have to look in the brothels." That is, in the brothels of the region. It was easy. In all of them, the average age of the women was between 12 and 16 years old. I made a deal with one of the local madams and, the next day, the scene was filmed without any major problems. Among the girls, one stood out for her beauty and vivacity. During a break in filming, I struck up a conversation with her. “How long have you been in this life?” “Almost three years. I was twelve when my father sold me to the madam. In the beginning it was very hard, having to put up with all those men. But now I'm doing well, because I'm a one-man woman. He arranged with the madam for me to stay only with him.” “And he comes to see you every night?” “No, only once a week. It's the mayor.”

And since we're on the subject of moral laxity related to child prostitution, let me tell you another story. Five or six years ago, I was in Fortaleza, accompanying the work of the NGO Greenpeace, which had organized an exhibition of green technologies in a large booth set up on the Iracema beach boardwalk. As night fell, the boardwalk was crowded with strollers circulating among the hundreds of stalls of the craft fair that operates there, and I was drawn by a commotion of many voices. A young prostitute had started a fight with an Italian tourist. Simply put: the tourist had just left a nearby hotel with the girl who, like so many of her colleagues, couldn't have been more than 14 years old. The encounter had taken place, and he had paid what had been agreed upon. But the young prostitute wasn't satisfied and asked for more money. When the client refused, while they were in the middle of the crowd and near a police car, she decided to have a major tantrum, accusing the Italian of being a pedophile. It was inevitable: the guards came and took the Italian away. Someone next to me commented: "He didn't want to give the girl any more money, he'll have to give it to the police."

Everything could have ended there, in a simple brawl over prostitution. But no. What I witnessed next is still echoing in my eyes and ears today. As soon as the tourist was taken away by the guards, the owner of the craft stall where I was doing some shopping, a plump woman of about 50 years old, with a wedding ring on her left ring finger, certainly a mother of several children and grandmother of many grandchildren, came out from behind the counter and went to confront the young sex worker. “You are a terrible prostitute,” the vendor shouted. “You made a deal with the client and didn't respect the agreement, you preferred to put the customer in the hands of the police. It's dishonest professionals like you who ruin the market!”

When things calmed down and the woman returned to the other side of the counter, I was still naive enough to comment: “But ma’am, she’s just a girl. Do you think it’s normal for her to be prostituting herself like that?” The shopkeeper’s reaction was immediate: “That one? My friend, she’s been in this business for about three years. She has a habit of scamming tourists. She’s hurting her colleagues who work honestly. Don’t you know that many of them support their entire families, including their younger siblings?”

That's how it is, dear Juan Arias, in the heart of contemporary Fortaleza. For that dignified Brazilian mother, what matters is not whether she prostitutes herself or not. What matters is respecting the rules of the game, and supporting her own family, of course. It also happened in Italy, in Naples, during the war, as Curzio Malaparte recounts in his book "The Skin," when grandmothers took their still beardless grandsons to serve the unorthodox sexual appetites of Moroccan soldiers stationed in the region. And it seems that today there is a lawsuit against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who was having a party with a minor Moroccan prostitute.

The girl from Iracema beach was "a terrible prostitute," as that mother from Ceará described her. Our corrupt politicians have someone to take after...

 

Juan Arias is the Brazilian correspondent for the Spanish newspaper "El País".